A Geographic Information System (GIS) captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data linked to geographic locations. Example GISs include Google Earth™, ArcGIS® from ESRI, and commercial fleet management services.
In general, a GIS presents tools for users to query and make decisions based on geographic information. The geographic information may be spatial and temporal; and is often heterogeneous, from divergent sources, and may contain structured and unstructured data. As a result, the processing of this data becomes complex and involves numerous challenges. For example, the use of multiple, disparate tools are often necessary in order to process and analyze geospatial data in real-time. These tools are often expensive and can require specialized skills and training to use. In addition, each tool may require the data to be in different formats, increasing the difficulty in combining heterogeneous types of data.
Another challenge associated with current commercial systems is that much of the information currently stored in these systems is either historical or static in nature. While this is acceptable for visualizing data such as road-maps, and even handling a single moving object, such as in global positioning system (GPS) navigation where a moving vehicle is the only dynamic object represented, there exists a gap in presenting and handling the dynamic information associated with moving objects in the surrounding environment having different locations, speeds, shapes and trajectories.